Climate-Friendly Cocktail Recipes Go Light on Ice
It takes a lot of water and energy to make negronis, manhattans and margaritas. Could we do with less ice?
By Amy Brady on July 1, 2023
Scientific American July 2023 Issue
In the early 19th century, more than 100 years before electric refrigeration, an entrepreneurial Bostonian named Frederic Tudor landed on an idea: He'd cut blocks of ice from his Massachusetts lake and sell it to places where temperatures were too warm for ice to form naturally. Potential financiers thought this plan was too absurd to work. How would he ship the ice without it melting, they wondered, and who would buy it when it could be harvested for free?
Ultimately Tudor not only succeeded at distributing and selling ice—his trade revolutionized how Americans thought of food. Having access to ice enabled people to better preserve their meat and milk, reducing instances of food poisoning and launching the concept of leftovers. The initial desire for ice in warm places, however, wasn't driven by solutions to spoilage and illness: it came from bartenders. Tudor sailed to Cuba in 1815, where he found his first receptive market in the country's ubiquitous café culture. Cubans trusted their local baristas, each of whom had their own twist on café Cubano or a proprietary recipe for mixing crushed fruit with rum. Tudor demonstrated how to adapt those drinks into iced versions, and any initial suspicion of frozen-water chunks floating in glasses quickly turned into frothy demand. Five years later, when Tudor introduced ice to the bartenders in New Orleans's French Quarter, the alluring taste of chilled alcohol gave birth to the American cocktail culture we have today.
Ice not only cools cocktails; it changes their flavor, texture and balance. Shaking liquids with one-inch cubes, for example, aerates the alcohol and emphasizes subtle flavors, and it can also produce thick foams necessary for drinks such as the whisky sour. Crushed ice, meanwhile, dilutes cocktails quickly because of its high surface area, creating the refreshing, slushy consistency found in juleps that would taste too cloying otherwise. Bartenders in New Orleans went from serving simple, lukewarm drinks to inventing some of the country's most famous cocktails. There was the Sazerac, of course, in which the ingredients are stirred with ice to temper the burn of the high-proof rye and absinthe while melding the flavors. Henry Charles Ramos created his eponymous gin fizz in 1888 by shaking the liquids (including egg white and citrus) with crushed ice for a full 12 minutes, “until there is not a bubble left but the drink is smooth and snowy white and the consistency of a good rich milk.” In essence, ice transformed bartending from a mere job to a craft that involved creativity, chemistry and flourish.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-friendly-cocktail-recipes-go-light-on-ice/
